Australia will spend $1.19 billion over the next 10 years to strengthen the cyber defenses of private companies and households following a rise in cyberattacks, PM Scott Morrison will announce today.

According to a report by Reuters, the company paid $4.5 million to those behind the ransomware after the attack knocked some 30,000 of the company’s computers offline.

U.S. travel management firm CWT paid $4.5 million this week to hackers who stole reams of sensitive corporate files and said they had knocked 30,000 computers offline.

Chinese government-linked hackers targeted American biotech company Moderna, a COVID-19 vaccine developer, in a bid to steal data, according to a U.S. security official tracking Chinese hacking.

Twitter, whose internal systems were breached about two weeks ago, said on Thursday the incident targeted a small number of employees through a phone “spear-phishing” attack.

A government audit of India’s flagship payments processor last year found more than 40 security vulnerabilities including several it called “critical” and “high” risk.

The former employees familiar with Twitter security practices said that too many people could have aided the hack, more than 1,000 as of earlier in 2020, including some at contractors like Cognizant.

The New York State Department of Financial Services said Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, drivers’ licenses, etc were exposed from October 2014 to May 2019 by the firm's website.

China asked the United States to immediately stop making accusations against it about cybercrimes, in response to the indictment of two Chinese nationals for hacking COVID data and defense secrets.

The UK’s NCSC said on Thursday that hackers backed by the Russian state were trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine and treatment research from academic and pharmaceutical institutions around the world.